Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Porta-Potties Work

Episode Date: September 12, 2020

Despite our lengthy history of evacuating our bowels and bladders, it wasn’t until the relatively recent 1940s that we began to construct portable, self-contained toilets to accept our waste. Dive into the world of porta-potties in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Happy weekend, folks. In old podcast time, it is December 15th, 2016. In modern podcast time, it's 2020. One thing that has not changed between 2016 and 2020 is how porta-potties work.

It's an interesting topic, believe it or not. I remember really enjoying this episode. Don't really enjoy porta-potties, but it's kind of a neat thing to research, believe it or not. So give it a listen, why don't you? How porta-potties work. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry, Master Ace Rowland. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, Poopy Edition. This one's gonna get disgusting. Yeah, I mean, I don't think you need trigger warnings

when the title of the episode has got porta-potty in it, but we'll just throw it out there. We're gonna be talking about poop and pee. And so if you're having lunch, maybe just put that chili dog down. You gag easily? Yeah, sure. Okay, well Chuck, I don't think we can put it off any longer.

Yeah, that kind of beat it up. I kind of like how this article actually starts though by Dave Ruse. He talks about the taste of Chicago. Oh, is this a Ruse jam? Yes, it is. It's good. So he talks about how if you go to the taste of Chicago,

right, every July they hold it at the Grant Park alongside the lake. When was our show there, by the way? Was that July? No, it was chillier than that. I think it was October. Okay, they had something had happened in Grant Park because I remember seeing hundreds and hundreds

of porta-potties on the drive-in. Oh, really? Yeah, so something. Maybe they just always have them there. No, I don't think so. No, okay. Well, for the taste of Chicago, they definitely have porta-potties.

In fact, for 2014, and we should say there's like a million people that come through this thing over the course of the week. Yeah, it's a lot of folks. It really is. Have you ever been to Atlanta's taste of anything? No. I haven't either.

I don't think a million people show up for it though. It makes me want to go try Chicago's. Me too. But so you've got a million people and service sanitation Inc, which is the company that landed the porta-potty contract, crunched the numbers,

looked at the food that was going to be there, said, do you going to have some beer? Yeah. Yeah, okay. They carried the one and they came up with 380 regular porta-potties. 28 wheelchair accessible porta-potties. Good.

And 80 hand washing stations. They have soap and fresh running water. Not bad. Right. So here's the thing. Like that's great. They delivered all those things, but had they just walked away

and said, see you at the end of taste of Chicago, it would have been a living nightmare for everyone involved. Yeah, that would be, it would be more than the taste of Chicago. Be the sickening smell of Chicago. Yeah, that would have been bad because, well, we'll get into it,

but porta-potties sometimes you can leave them, come back a week later and just take them away. If it's a temporary work site or something. But sometimes when you're selling beer and chili, you need to come at the end of every day and clean those suckers out. Yes. And that's what they did.

They came at night when everyone was sleeping. Yeah. Well, I guess if you went to bed at 9 p.m. That's when I'm sleeping. But they would come every night from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m. and they would work. And here's the thing, like porta-potties, it turns out I was overthinking them.

I thought there was maybe a little more going on. No, they are, they are self, I really don't know what I thought. It escaped me as the reality of porta-potties sunk in. My delusions about them kind of escaped me. It trickled away and now I can't remember what they were. You've used a porta-pottie, right? Sure I have.

Okay. So I was like holding my breath and like, just barely had my eyes open because I didn't want any germs to get on my eyeballs. So I wasn't paying that much attention. It's an in and out kind of thing. Yeah. It turns out that like when you serve as a porta-pottie,

what you're doing is you're showing up with a truck as a tank with a vacuum on it, a pressurized tank. And you are sucking the contents out of that porta-pottie. Yep. And then you put it in the truck, you drive off and you dump it off at the waste treatment plant of your local city or town. Yep.

It's like a gigantic wet vac. Yes it is. For poo poo and pee pee. Yes. And a very dangerous one. I saw at least one story in a porta-pottie trade magazine that somebody who, I've read a bunch of those in the last- What was the magazine called?

It's called Portable Restroom Operator Pro. It's a good mag, man. I actually found this one issue online going all the way back to 2009 that I was looking for. So they're legit. Yeah, but they could have been a little more fun with the name. Well, I think they're saying like, hey man, folks all the fun you want, but we're saving your behind.

Hey, see that? That sounds like a slogan. I'm sure it is. Well, they do point out a couple of the slogans because porta-pottie companies or porta-johns, jiffy-johns, port-a-loo if you're in England, toy-toy if you're in Malaysia, they're very famous for having pretty fun punny slogans. Like we're number one in the number two business.

Not bad. No, it's not bad. No one takes care of our business like Mr. John. Sure, I saw that too. There's also one called got to go, but it's spelled really impressively. It's G, it's all one word and it's lower case. So it's super mod, G-O-T-U with an umlaut, G-O, love it.

You like that one? Yeah, I thought you were going in a different direction. I thought it was going to be a little more like G-E-A-U-X. No, that's like if they were in Louisiana maybe. Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure, no, this had an umlaut, that's what got me. Well, I know you. That's why you love Motley Crue so much.

Sure it is. All right, so should we talk a little bit about the history? I think so. All right, well, we need to go back to World War II in this case. And because World War II was going on, there was a need for more poopers essentially. Right.

Because they had like manufacturing plants popping up. They had temporary manufacturing plants going up. They had places where they didn't want to build full service permanent bathrooms all over the place all of a sudden. These people needed to go potty. What I saw, I saw a few different origin stories, but the one I saw the most frequently was that the shipbuilding docks at Long Beach during World War II.

Sure. They were building warships for the US. The guys working the docks would have to, or working building the ships, would have to get on a rowboat and go back to the dock to use the bathroom. Yeah, that's no good. And they were like, this is a terrible waste of time. Can we just get something on the ship?

So they started building temporary, what amounted to the first porta-potties, they are on the ships for them to use. Yeah, and these first ones, you can look up a picture of the Andy Gump, is that what it's called? I didn't see, I got to look that up. I think it's the Andy Gump, like one of the, just type in like 1940s porta-potty,

and there will be a picture, and it's basically this big heavy metal square. Sometimes they were wood, but they were super heavy and they weren't easily transported. They, you know, this is pre-using like chemicals, which we'll get into to help break these, the poo-poo down and stuff. So it was just a disgusting affair.

I know, I'm having trouble right now. I see the Andy Gump. You see it? Wow, it looks like... It looks safe to be in. You know what it looks like? It looks like what they used on mash. Yeah, like the latrine.

Yeah, same idea basically. Yeah. Just a latrine, you could take places. Gotcha. But I came across this really cool little thing on a website about World War II fighter pilots. And with World War II came along planes that could stay in these bombers,

that could stay in the air for a lot longer. And they started to think like, hey, these dudes are up there for like, you know, 10 to 14 hours. We have to come up with ways for them to go to the bathroom. Right, yeah. I mean, like, you don't think about that.

Like when we did the frostbite episode, I certainly didn't think that they were up there getting frostbite because it was so, you know, cold. I also didn't think that they were up there so long that they couldn't use the bathroom. They had to hold it, right? So yeah, and the earliest ones were, well, here's a funnel and it's attached to a tube

and it leads out of the plane. So go ahead and pee. Yeah, and that's basically just for like the pilot and copilot. Right, this relief tube. After that, they're like, well, what do we have to poop? Yeah. They said, can you get your hands on a produce crate?

And the crew would say like, well, yeah, sure. We have a produce crate, of course. What are we commies? And the people in charge would say, well, poop in that. Take that up in the plane and just poop in that, buddy. And maybe wash it out when you get down here and put it back in for later use. Yeah, or maybe just get a new crate.

I guess, if you're not thrifty. Eventually they came up with something called the Elson, E-E-E-L-S-A-N. It's a chemical toilet and it was really kind of one of the first little porta potties, but if you look up Elson and on the images on Google, you will find that it looks like nothing more than a metal oil can that you sit on.

It's basically what it was. Pretty much. Yeah. And you're all there exposed. I mean, there's no room that this is in. You're just doing this in front of, you know, you're all your buddies on the plane. Right, like prison.

Sure. And I mean, the Elson toilet was still, I mean, as primitive as it was, it was in advancement, but it had certain problems, right? Like if you were flying through turbulence. Yeah. The Elson would spill its contents out into the plane. Yeah.

There's a few quotes here. I'd like to read a couple of these from some of these fighter pilots. Here's one, and this is from a British pilot. While we were flying in rough air, this devil's convenience often shared its contents with the floor of the aircraft, the walls and ceiling, and sometimes a bit remained in the container itself.

It doesn't take much imagination to picture what it was like trying to combat fear and air sickness while struggling to remove enough gear in cramped quarters. And at the same time, trying to use the bloody Elson. If it wasn't an invention of the devil, it certainly might have been one foisted on us by the enemy. When seated in frigid cold

amid the cacophony of roaring engines and whistling air, away from what should have been one of life's peaceful moments, the occupant had a chance to fully ponder the miserable condition of his life. This loathsome creation invariably overflowed on long trips and in turbulence was always prone to bathe the nether regions of the user.

That's so gross. It was one of the true reminders to me that war is hell. That's so gross. I don't think about this stuff. You hear about all the glory of being like a bomber pilot. You don't think about sitting on a can and having your friends poop and pee slash up on your fanny. Sorry to those in the UK.

We fancies. Right, so it doesn't even make sense in that context. That means something different here in the US. Right. In your butt. Right. So yeah, that's the first, I guess, chemical toilet, which is a designation of a porta potty, right?

Like a porta potty is a chemical toilet, but not all chemical toilets are porta potties. That's right. But a chemical toilet is any kind of toilet where you have something in there that's intended to break down waste. And actually, I don't know that an Elson toilet, I guess it was a chemical toilet, I see now,

but that's gross because in addition to getting the rest of the crews poop and pee slopped up against your rear end. So too, were you getting very, very hazardous chemicals? Oh, back then for sure. As well, yeah. So that's not good, man. That guy may have had his buttocks removed after the war.

One of the uses of the toilet, they said that this is supposedly very true is that some members of the Royal Air Force actually jettisoned the Elson toilets with their bomb payload on the German targets. I bet. They dropped these toilets full of poo on the Germans. And there was an American too,

who had a great quote about peeing through the little hose. He said, as the urine ran through the tube, it turned to ice and dropped like topaz colored hail to the ground. I like to imagine every time I urinated over Germany, my assiduous projectile would plink on some Nazi burgers, Aryan nose. Poetry.

Yeah. There's some more good stories in here. You should, oh man, I don't remember which website it was. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'll have to post that later on Facebook. Yeah, for sure. And I'll tweet it.

All right. So that's the war effort that eventually ultimately led to the creation of the porta potty, right? Yes. And again, like there were already latrines that had already been outhouses. And the difference between an outhouse and a porta potty

is that an outhouse is basically some sort of rigid structure that's intended to be permanent or semi-permanent that's dug over a hole in the ground. That's it. A porta potty is a self-contained unit that has a place where the waste goes and is held inside that unit rather than like put into the ground,

which is extremely dangerous. We learned a very long time ago, pooping in holes in the ground is not a good way to go as far as public health is concerned. No, it's not. And that's one of the legitimate marks in the favor of porta potty is as gross as most people who've ever used one thinks they are,

they're actually quite beneficial to public health. Yeah. And they're green too, saves a lot of water. Yeah, I saw 170 billion liters a year, about 125 million gallons a day in the US alone. Crazy. Yeah. So you wanna take a break for a second?

Yeah, we'll break and we'll talk a little bit more about the evolution of the porta-john right after this. We'll see you in a bit. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

cause you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuckers. So we're talking about the evolution of the Portageon. You got the Andy Gump. You've got the Elson toilet. And then finally, in actually the 60s, you have what is the, what we think of as a porta potty. A patent was developed by a guy named George Harding.

And he called it for a portable toilet cabana, and it was made from plastic. And although he had the patent for it, the guy who actually gets credit for actually creating the first real modern Portageon or porta potty was a guy named Harvey Heather. Yeah. And he created what's called the Strongbox.

That's a great name. Did you see, have you seen the Strongbox? Oh yeah. Oh, you did? That's what I went and found the December 2009 issue of Pro Magazine to find, because I saw a reference that they had published a picture of it, and I couldn't find it anywhere else.

Oh yeah? Those things are ugly. Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't a great looking, it's not like the fantastic Portageon they have today. Yeah. Just so gorgeous to look at. Right. No, this thing was ugly.

Yeah. It had no alibi. Yeah, and these were made of fiberglass, which was good. It was lightweight, and it was sturdy. It was as sturdy as metal or wood, and it was a lot easier to clean. But the problem with the Strongbox and the fiberglasses,

it was a big kind of one piece mold. It was dark inside, which was not good. That's a big drawback. They weren't stackable as far as transporting them, and so that just made it really expensive to get them where they needed to go and back again. It did, and the fact that it was completely opaque, and there was no light that could get in, that's an issue.

Plus I also get the impression that the floors could get pretty slick, and you could fall and die of positional asphyxiation in a Portageon. Yeah, and they were also, fiberglass is pretty fragile, so they would break a lot. Fiberglass absorbs odors, which was not good. And so shortly after the fiberglass came along, someone said, you know what, how about polyethylene?

This is what we will use. And George Harding, who you mentioned, co-founded the Polyjohn Corporation, and he started building the polyethylene portable toilets that were much better because they lasted longer, they would last like a decade, although I would not want to use a nine-year-old Portageon. Well, so that picture of the strongbox

that was published in Pro Magazine apparently had been out in service, it was still in service, and it had been built like 30 years before. Well. Yeah, you would know that your company could not have cared less about you if you show up to your job site and there's a strongbox there.

Yeah. And that's what you're expected to use. With all of the possible choices that your company could choose from, and they went with the strongbox, they don't care about you or your happiness. No. The polyethylene, the other good thing about them

were they were assembled into different parts and pieces, so it made them a lot easier to transport, a lot cheaper, and if a part broke, you might be able to replace it. Oh yeah, that is kind of good. Yeah. Makes sense. So hooray for polyethylene toilets. But one of the things that George Harding created

and his patent that I noticed was a ventilation system. Yeah. This is a big improvement, right? For sure. Because when you're just piling human waste upon human waste into a hole, it's going to create gasses, noxious gasses because bacteria is going to start decomposing that waste and as a byproduct of that decomposition,

they're going to produce what we experience as rotting fecal material, right? Yeah, it's not just that it's stinky, it's dangerous. It is dangerous and as that gas tries to find a way to escape upward, if the only hole available to it is the toilet that you're pooping or peeing into, those gasses are going to come out of it and you're going to vomit while you poop or pee as well.

So what George Harding had, I told you this one was going to be gross, what George Harding figured out was that if you could just basically create a pipe venting off that gas upward and out of the porta-potty, people would be willing to use porta-potties a lot more and that was a huge improvement. Yeah, he also said, how about we make this rooftop

translucent white so we can let in some natural light at least, why don't we improve the flooring so that it's not as slippy and maybe even further down the line, we'll have porta-potties that have a little urinal that's separate so you don't even have to sit your butt down on that most horrid of places. Right, yep. What about the roll-around toilet, did you see these?

Yeah, those, I mean, they make sense. So basically if you are on like a job site, right, where there are like different multiple stories being built and you're up on one of the higher stories, it's the same thing as when you're working in the shipyards building a ship, you don't want to have to come all the way down to use the bathroom.

So they created porta-potties that were a lot more mobile that could be hoisted by cranes just to different levels. Yeah, if you look up a roll-around toilet, it basically looks like one of those coolers that has the two wheels and the handle and you could pull the cooler around, except it's a larger and sitting above the wheels is a urinal.

Right. I don't see how you go poopy in those, so maybe that's when you go downstairs. Yeah, I don't know either. Because it's not enclosed or anything, I mean, it's just wide open. Just like prison. And there's actually a great scene from,

I think the first police academy starring our friend and Twitter follower, Steve Gutenberg. Goots. And I think it's Mauser who uses a porta-potty and Steve Gutenberg goes over and gets some crane operator to lend him the crane. Now it's Mauser's, his right hand man, I don't remember that guy's name,

but they lift the porta-potty up while he's inside using it. It's hilarious. Wacky, wacky stuff ensues. And then if you really are living the good life or you have a maybe a really nice upscale wedding that's out in a remote area, you don't wanna bring in just,

even the nicest polyethylene portagion won't do. You will bring in what we call in the movie business a honey wagon. It is a restroom trailer. And these are actually nice. They have running water, they have stalls, they have porcelain toilets. It's all partitioned.

They have sinks and running water and mirrors, hand towels. It's like a rolling trailer full of toilets. Yeah, like you can breathe through your nose in these things. You could lay down on the floor if you wanted. Yeah, and apparently these first started in 1984, Polyjohn in Columbus, Ohio. Go Buckeyes, yeah.

And the original trailer was eight stalls or as we said in the movie business, an eight banger. They had three urinals and it was 32 feet long. Wow. And now there are 19 companies manufacturing luxury restroom trailers around the world today. Yeah, I saw one that they market for outdoor weddings and stuff like that.

And they said, all you need are I think six outlets, maybe 620 volt outlets and standard garden hose connection. And you got yourself a luxury porta potty trailer. Yeah, for your next remote black tie event. Right, which I mean, even people in black tie got pee. Yeah, sure. So you might as well take it easy on them with a nice luxe trailer.

That's right. So speaking of Chuck, you wanna take a break? Yeah, I'm gonna go to a real bathroom. That's good. And hug it. And I'm gonna get a crane operator to play a prank on you. All right, we'll be right back.

We'll be right back. All of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. That's why you should know. OK, Chuck. Yep.

We can't put it off any longer. We've got to go inside. We're going to go inside, deep dive into the bowels of the porta pot. Oh, my gosh. OK. OK. You ready?

Yeah. Got your snorkel? Yep. OK. So when you look into a porta pot, you may notice that the stuff that's inside the bowl or inside the holding tank is blue. Yeah, and brown.

Sure. But it's more blue than brown, and that's no accident. That's right. Any porta potty is going to use a deep blue dye and the entire purpose from beginning to end of the blue dye is to visually mask the presence of human feces. Yeah, they don't want you looking down there and seeing if it was just like clear.

Like it's already disgusting. You're getting the full experience from the smell alone. You don't need the visual. Yeah, and you don't poop in these things, do you? Oh, no. OK. No, I think I would just put my pants and walk around instead. I don't think I would.

I certainly don't remember ever pooping in it. It's possible I blacked out that memory, but I don't think I ever have it. Yeah, like the first lullapalooza. Right. The only time I pooped in these, I'm sure there's been some extreme emergency, but the only time I can really recall

is when Emily and I were getting our master bath built at our house. Oh, no. We had another little bathroom, kind of a little small guest bathroom, and we shared that. And then we had a construction toilet on site because they were doing construction. And so I would get up in the mornings

excited when I want to be a good husband and not ruin Emily's day and morning by getting in there first. So I would get my newspaper and I would walk outside in my slippers and use the port of John in my driveway every morning. But I mean, I guess it was pretty clean. It was yours, right? It was great.

It was me and like two or three dudes. There you go. That is doable. Festival? Oh, no. Taste of Chicago? No. Like, yes, there are, like, of course,

surely if you're sharing a port of potty with a couple of other people that you have to look in the eye here or there, you're going to take care of it. But if it's random drunk strangers or people on drugs or something like that, it's going to get messy awfully fast. And again, as more and more people use it, that blue dye becomes more and more important.

Yes, it does. There's also going to be a fragrance that they're going to add to hopefully mask the odor. And apparently, again, well, I was reading in some trade magazines. And I haven't experienced it myself. But I did get the impression that they have come a long way as far as fragrance goes.

Yeah. Like I saw, you can get bubblegum fragrance. Oh, god. This doesn't sound good. Vanilla? Lasagna? That comes from just standard use of the taste of Chicago. Yeah, I mean, you know me with fragrances, period.

Yeah, I'm with you. It's even worse to me. Everything bagel? No, but like I came across this site and there's like a Jaguar brand, port of potty, fragrance additive. And they have like any fragrance you can imagine. New car?

Oh, god. Wow. And then the final thing you're going to see down there, or that it's going to be down there, are biocides to kill the bacteria and microbes. And it used to be that they would use formaldehyde to take care of that. But more and more wastewater treatment plants

started saying, hey, we can't properly dispose of that stuff now. It's a carcinogen and we don't feel good about it. So they've been phasing that out over the years, going a little greener. And now they actually use enzymes, like beneficial enzymes and microbes that feed on this stuff. Right, they help break down the poop

and they also feed on the bacteria that causes the smells. So they're making the poop inert, but they're also naturally cutting down on smells, which I just find fascinating. They also, since it's capable of breaking down bacteria, it's also capable of breaking down any organic material. So if you use the right kind of toilet paper, they'll break down the toilet paper as well.

It's just basically magic in a porta potty. Yeah, and the other benefit there is they don't need to be emptied as often if it's doing the job like it should. Weather has an effect, obviously. If you're in Georgia in the hot summer, things are going to get even worse. And I imagine Chicago in July is probably no picnic either.

And the taste of Chicago, no one's going to go to the taste of Chicago anymore. They're like, attended strut by 20% this year. You don't know what's going on. But when temperatures go up, bacteria go to work even harder and things are just going to smell even worse. So they might actually use more chemicals in the summer or more chemicals, especially if it's a summer festival.

Right. And then conversely, I saw this, I guess it was a blog post by a porta potty worker that was published on Cracked. And they basically just went over, most of the stuff you can imagine, but just crazy stuff that they found. But one of the things that they may reference to

is that the worst thing that they can encounter is frozen waste. Yeah. Because they said, once that happens, you have to break it up by hand. So to protect, to defend their people from having to do this, they will typically in colder areas during the winter,

they'll create a briny mixture that will have a lower freezing temperature. Like the Minnesota ice fishing festival. Right. But eventually you're going to reach a point where it's cold enough that it's freezing no matter how much salt you add to it. Yeah.

And I did see one of their little tricks of the trade is they put a cake of this rock salt in the urinal. So you go pee-pee on it. And as you pee-pee on it, it just adds a little more salt slowly throughout the day. Right. The only issue with those is that you have to keep the deer away.

Cause they love salt licks. You like that one? Yeah. I'm ashamed of basically every joke I've made this whole episode. I don't feel good about myself right now. All right, so let's finish up by talking about the really the worst part of this.

If you're one of like eight people still listening. Right. If you're still listening, then we'll finish up with the worst part, which is servicing these things. And we talked about it. It's like a wet vac. You suck it out,

drive it to a wastewater plant. But you have to add new water. You have to add new blue junk. And some more dry solution. I saw like a ratio of one to one. Fresh water to solution. We don't want to mess that up. No.

And you think like, all right, so that's pretty gross and everything, but especially at like a music festival or something, there's stuff everywhere. Like you've been in these. There's urine everywhere. There's poop in places where you think like, what in the world was someone doing in there?

And they have to be cleaned out by somebody. It's an awful job. Yeah, there's stuff that people drop down there. Like if you used a sock to wipe your bottom with, and you just deposit the sock into the porta potty, that's gonna gum up the tank or the pump. So they have to get that kind of stuff out first. What about your cell phone?

Cell phone. Yeah, apparently they find all sorts of stuff, especially things like phones, wallets full of cash, jewelry, drugs. A gun. Yeah, guns. That cracked guy said that he had a friend who showed up at a porta potty where they just found a body.

Oh my God. Yeah. In the thing? No, in the porta potty, not in the actual hole. Okay. That's just cruel. Yeah. But yeah, they find all sorts of stuff

because almost everybody would say, well, that's gone. I'll just have to get a new identity because I dropped my whole wallet in the porta potty. Actually, I saw a stat where 5% of people that go into porta potty don't come out at all. So the dead body scenario makes sense. They end up in that other dimension from phantasm. And then our article says that the worst case scenario,

if you're a porta potty service person, is that the porta potty, well, there's two worst case, one worse and one way worse. One is if it just gets knocked over either by a car hitting it or the wind or some jerk who thinks it's funny. That's not cool. Knocks it not cool at all, knocks it over on purpose.

But the ultimate, ultimate worst is if it tips over on its door. That's its Achilles heel. Any porta potty's Achilles heel. Yeah, because what happens? All of the stuff that's in the holding tank gets dumped out when it's facing on its front, on the door. All of the stuff is liable to come out.

And it does, especially when they pick it back up, it just sloshes around everywhere. And the porta potty service operator has to wash this thing out. And those are the worst. Somebody can put poop on the ceiling or on the walls or something. That's pretty bad.

But when it falls on its front, on the door, and everything sloshes out, it gets everywhere. So you have to like get inside to clean the whole thing. And at the very least, it takes them a lot more time and screws up their entire day's schedule. At the worst, they're in there cleaning a filthy porta potty's, nook and crannies from the inside. Yeah, I would just say it fell off the truck, boss.

Sorry. It's in that phantasm dimension, boss. Didn't the guys from Jackass do one of these? Like put one of them in there and tip it over or something? Yeah, I'm sure. I think they did that when they were like four. Yeah, I think they did like had a crane lift it and turn it over or something.

I don't know. No, you're thinking police academy. And also police academy gigs, you don't have to write in. It was police academy three. No, I was about to say, I didn't, I don't remember that. I did not see three. You didn't see, what? No, I think I petered out after two even.

Three might have been the best of all of them. Which is that, what was the full name of it? Citizens on patrol. Okay. It's the one where Bob Goldthwaite like goes over from his life of crime to being a junior police academy guy. Yeah. I love Bob Goldthwaite, but.

He's good. He's great. Can we stop? Sure, man. Okay. Oh, we have to say, you got anything else? No. Okay, Chuck.

Oh, actually I do. No. If you see these porta potty service people in your neighborhood, if there's construction going on, you see them bring in the truck, just flash a nice smile, give them a tip of the cap. It's a really gnarly job. And like they say, somebody's got to do it.

They're making a living. Like they've got a job. They went out and got that job to make money and provide for their family. And don't forget, they're defending public health and they're saving a significant amount of water. Yeah. So there you go.

Nice Chuck. All right. Good way to finish. If you want to know more about porta potty's, you can type those, that hyphenated word on the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said hyphen, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this quick John Cleese correction.

Or John Cleese. Exactly. Congratulations on an absolutely marvelous episode concerning Monty Python, guys. It's great to hear so much of the history of the group. Well done. One bit of information. I happen to see John Cleese present a one man show

a few years ago in Carmel, California. He just stood on stage and talked for about 75 minutes. Boy, that's a good gig. He discussed his life in general Python in particular and lots of other things. He noted that his name is pronounced a rhyme with cheese rather than fleece. In fact, his surname was originally cheese,

but his father changed it to Cleese. That's so awesome. This was a good thing for the son being named John because he did not want to go by Jack G's. Yeah, I guess not. So it's John Cleese, never knew that. That's from David Hewitt. Yeah, and I also want to say, Chuck,

somebody called us out for not mentioning Carol Cleveland. She was for all intents and purposes the seventh member of Monty Python. Yeah, we felt terrible because she was in our notes and we mentioned her and lavish praise on her in our run through that we did in the studio. And it was just one of those live show things that got by us.

Yeah, so sorry, Carol Cleveland. Yeah. We hats off to you. We appreciate your work and we're sorry we left you out. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with me or Chuck, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh on Clark and there's also SYSK podcast.

Chuck's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook and at stuff you should know on Facebook. You can send the both of us and Jerry in email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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